reins of power but i don t think it s necessarily him. i m following this quite closely. there s a lot of pressure on malaki to step aside and to hand it to someone else within his own coalition, within his shiite party. but it s really unclear if malaki, one, wants to do this and who he would want to hand that power to. he might want to pick his own successor so he doesn t end up in prison or facing charges and longer it takes the more unstable this country is. it does seem like the conversation s just in an intractable place and as you point out the same old characters again and again and also political repercussions back home and turn to the political panel on that. david, the one clear agreement amongst americans seems to be they don t want troops back in iraq. how s this new deployment of extra 300 individuals going to
play? well, at a time when things continue to deteriorate in iraq, it is all the more important that our foreign policy be very clear and have no ambiguity as to what our goals are, and unfortunately, the president s policies at best are timid and fractured which if you msnbc even did a story last week given the disapproval of the president on foreign policy, could it cause democrats races this fall? certainly is hard for him to rally his support when people don t know what his policy even is and timid and people don t understand it. for example, when he talked about sending in combat troops, he also says in the very same breath or in the very same statement that they aren t combat troops. they re combat ready troops. and what does that mean? it is this timid and this ambiguity that doesn t allow
arms o soldiers of the islamic state and fight, fight! joining me now, nbc news chief correspondent richard engel of baghdad and andrew linkman, analyst and spent over 30 years at the cia working on some of the issues, ro del moladu and also david anvela president of go pac. thank you all for coming. richard, let s start with the recording. does this give us new information? it doesn t give us much new information but i think it gives us a characterization of the organization. baghdadi doesn t consider himself the leader of isis anymore. he considers himself the caliph leading a caliphate and reaching out for organizations across the world, muslim original saiss, individuals to wear allegiance to him.
see that as a code word of drawn back into a long-term conflict in iraq and i think that s probably where you see the partisan divide as to the if i los tif i of using the might to use and stayed in iraq and that we should have troops and not just a couple hundred troops but a few thousand troops there and that we re going to be at war always with al qaeda, whether it s isis and so forth. you see more on the democratic side a nuanced approach of once again wanting to maybe find political answers to these problems. all right. well, thank you, richard, stay safe out. david and rodel, thank you. we ll come back to you. andrew, stick around. we ll deeper on this question of isis and in particular the extraordinary recruiting capacity they re showing. how are they getting the foreign fighters? well, we re going to take you inside one of the most and
americans to know where he is going and makes it hard to rally behind him. well look. it does mean a mark of distinction. we are not going guns blazing into battle and preparing for potential attacks but i take the point it s a hard sell xlit c politically. one thing that interested me is there s a partisan split we are seeing in the numbers back to the christian science monitor numbers just coming out. 73% of republicans agree that isis and the gains they re making in iraq right now put americans in a threatened position, potentially even on american soil. but on the other hand, 39% of democrats take that view. a big difference in opinion. rodel, why would this be a partisan issue? listen. i think just starting off, the president s walking a very thin line here. i think he s doing it well between trying to protect u.s. interest and not getting drawn into a long-term conflict in iraq. you know, when dave talks about wars, uses words like timid, you